


As My Whimsy Takes Me

by imaginarycircus



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: F/M, Oxford, Post War, World War II, rations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:09:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginarycircus/pseuds/imaginarycircus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter and Harriet make their first visit to Oxford after the war along with their children. Takes place in March of 1946.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As My Whimsy Takes Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesireeArmfeldt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/gifts).



> Very great thanks to K, F, and J for beta reading and generally listening to me pour dirt on my head.

It was the first time she'd visited Oxford since the before war, but that horror was was mercifully over. Harriet watched her lord and master set off in the direction of St. Giles with three small boys gamboling smartly after him like ducklings in grey flannel. _God be with you, Balliol men._ 1

"And how are all the Wimsey men coping with this adorable interloper?" Miss Martin was rubbing noses with Miss Honoria Mary Vane Wimsey, aged six months, who endured it with that world-weary amusement particular to infants and Socratic philosophers. 

"The boys were initially startled by news of a sister and turned their gimlet eyes upon her. Peter went into raptures, which didn't help. They tried very hard to be young gentleman, but treated her much like she had UXB chalked on her forehead."

"I am assuming that has changed," the dean said in a sing-song voice of which Harriet wouldn't have guessed Miss Martin capable.

"I don't think anyone could resist this gorgeous smile," Miss Lydgate said, letting the baby grab her index finger. 

The ladies were so entranced by Honoria that Harriet briefly entertained herself by imagining that she'd shucked her clothing and rolled on the grass to see if anything could distract them from the orgy of cooing. Ridiculous and fanciful. It was not quite warm enough for displays of nudity. 

She dutifully responded, after the pause that no one noticed, "Oh, yes they're quite mad for her now. She was rather beautifully sick all over her father's favorite jacket. Her brothers thought it uproariously funny and accepted her as one of their own. They squabble over who may hold her. Bredon says it's because they hope for a repeat performance, but I've caught him singing 'Sumer is Icumen In' to her when he thinks no one else is about." 

"The male of the species can be so very odd about affection." Miss Lydgate's finger was still trapped in her daughter's tight little fist. 

Miss Martin reluctantly handed Honoria off to Miss Lydgate and embraced Harriet. The dean touched the wool of her sleeve as if it were a rare folio. "Your suit is beautiful!"

Harriet was relieved to explain that it had been purchased in New York, where materials was not as scarce. They still had shortages and some rationing there, but it was not as severe. And of course with money everything changes, but that was not a topic for polite conversation. 

"We will be forced to go around in sackcloth and ashes if these fabric rations don't let up soon," Miss Edwards said rather more cheerfully than one might expect for a woman wearing a dress with an iron burn on one sleeve. 

Miss Martin and Miss Edwards debated rumors. Miss Martin hoped six months might be long enough, but Miss Edwards thought it would be at least another year before rationing eased. Harriet thought it would be considerably longer, but did not say so. Everyone agreed that nylons were impossible to get.

"It is so very good to see you, Lady Peter." The Warden sailed across the quad and ushered them into the SCR for tea. "You look in the pink." 

The sun was strong enough to warm one's hair and Harriet missed it when they passed inside. Hilary term had ended the week before, but Shrewsbury looked remarkably like its dear old self. The lawns were patchy even though the Army had removed the water tanks and shelters described to Harriet in letters as necessary eyesores. The SCR smelled pleasantly of bees wax and appeared almost exactly as it had that awful night they'd questioned Annie Wilson. Buildings persist in a way that human flesh does not. Stone and wood absorb human frustrations and woes and look none the worse for wear.

Tea was served without milk or sugar, but it was good tea and not the chalky, tasteless, yet ubiquitous "cocoa." Everyone eyed the tray of gray ration bread and government cheddar balefully, but ate it because one must keep body and soul together. 

The baby was much admired while Harriet sipped her tea. She was a jumble of pride and resentment, feelings that sat in her gut like cement. She asked one of the new scouts to fetch the basket she'd brought with her and presented it to the Warden, who accepted it with great dignity and calm. Until she lifted the linen cover. 

"Oh, my dear!" Dr. Baring who had endured air raids, fire watches, shortages of every kind, and had lost her students to conscription with the stiffest of upper lips looked as close to discomposed as anyone had ever seen her. 

Harriet had tucked away some provisions from her American publisher and brought a few items from home. Dr. Baring passed an enormous pot of honey to the dean who hugged it to her chest. "From your own industrious bees!" There were several tins of biscuits and large bars of chocolate. Peter had donated two very fine old bottles of sherry.

The dons fell upon the biscuits and passed around the chocolate with a joy that was painful to watch. What good was all the money if you couldn't do things for other people? Still, Harriet wasn't sure she'd ever do it gracefully. She shifted in her chair and couldn't find a comfortable place to put her hands. How strange that they'd once eaten sandwiches and biscuits in this very room so nonchalantly. It seemed wanton now. The ladies at Shrewsbury were thinner, but wasn't everyone? One ate the hard bread and cheese and was grateful for it. No one liked lentil cutlets. One merely endured them. 

"There are enough biscuits for everyone to have at least one more," Miss Martin extended the tin and no one had to be asked twice. Some of the ladies ate theirs in two bites, while others nibbled to make the experience last as long as possible. The Wimseys had been better off than many during the war, but they'd felt the pinch and lack. Harriet missed a splash of milk in her tea, though she'd never cared for sugar. She watched Miss Lydgate spoon an indecent amount of honey into her cup. Harriet would not make the poor woman self-conscious at any price, but Miss Edwards caught her eye and twinkled at her.

"Do you remember Miss Hillyard? I am sure you must!" Miss Martin said. "She married a very nice man she met when he was billeted over at Brasenose and seems quite content off in the wilds of Scotland." 

"Inverness is hardly a wilderness. You make it sound like she's gone to live in a tree in the Forest of Dean. We must grow accustomed to calling her Mrs. Fraser." Dr. Baring sipped her tea. The lines around her eyes were deeper and her hands trembled slightly when she raised her cup.

"I'm very glad to hear it." Harriet would never consider the former Miss Hillyard a friend, but she wished her well. "I'm surprised she gave up her post here after all her protestations about women being subservient to their husbands."

Miss Lydgate, as usual, spoke with breathtaking honesty what would sound like impertinence from anyone else. "We all thought she'd be happier if she could find the right sort of marriage to the right sort of man. Thank goodness she did."

"Is he also an historian?" Harriet inquired, aiming not to sound too gossipy, but perishing of curiosity. 

"That's the most singular part of the whole story," Mrs. Peppercorn, née Chilperic, burst out. Marriage and motherhood had given her confidence, or perhaps it had been the war. "He's not a scholar at all. He's an engineer. He's completely over the moon for her. I don't think she's in any way subservient."

No one was ill mannered enough to laugh, but they were grinning. The warden was bouncing Honoria on her knee. Harriet felt an unaccountable desire to snatch her daughter and flee back home where she could be calm. It unnerved her. No one at home poked up her emotions as easily as one stirred a fire to life. At Talboys they had routine. There was work to be done and how one felt about it hadn't mattered for a very long time. No. That wasn't exactly it. Everything was muddled and Harriet sat up straighter and caught the dean's eye, fed up with herself.

"How is Miss de Vine?" Harriet had not heard from her in some time and was almost afraid to ask for fear of bad news. 

"As you know, she spent a good deal of the war in London at the Home Office or somewhere. We never could get any but the most vague of answers as to what use they were applying her enormous intelligence. We thought perhaps you might know." Miss Martin clutched the empty biscuit tin in her lap. Harriet wouldn't blame her one bit for eating the crumbs. 

"If Peter knows anything he never said a word, but then he wouldn't. Not if it was truly a secret. But is she well? I haven't heard from her in some time." 

"They've discovered a new heart medicine that helps, but she's been worn down to a nub. Cropped all that marvelous hair though and is the White Queen no longer." Miss Martin twinkled a little and Harriet recalled all those ghastly hairpins. 

Dr. Baring added, "She's retired to Bath for a rest cure, like a consumptive heroine in a Victorian novel. She endured the whole of it with great courage and focus, but even the most stalwart souls can only stand so much." 

"Is she resting?" Harriet could infer the answer from the look that passed between Miss Lydgate and the dean. 

"Not as much as one would hope, but she must always be working. I think she'd rather stop breathing than leave work undone." Miss Lydgate added more tea to her cup, but not, Harriet noted, more honey. 

"How is your brood getting on?" The warden asked.

The baby was flailing her fists and looked approximately two minutes away from howling. Harriet worried that her daughter would turn out a beauty, but also hoped the child would. Honoria had her dark hair and her father's fair complexion and light eyes.

"Quite well. Bredon is very keen on cricket and impatient to get off to Eton. Paul and Roger imitate him in everything, which is good because he's got very nice manners for a ten-year-old boy. They've accepted their sister wholeheartedly since Peter told them she'll be able to ride a horse and play cricket if she wants to." Harriet was uncertain what to say about her husband and felt a great coward for it. One could not get blood from a stone and Peter had been reduced to something stone-like toward the end of the war. Returning to Oxford had raked up many feelings one had rather had stayed quite settled.

"Lord Peter looks very well." Miss Lydgate remarked. "Though perhaps a trifle whiter about the temples."

"He is much the same as ever." Which was true if one did not scratch the veneer of civil urbanity. A feat that was near impossible to manage if you shared a bed chamber with the man. Harriet's legs nearly ached from walking on metaphorical egg shells. She knew it would do no good to shout at him. It wasn't his fault. It was so very far from being his fault. There must be a way to divert this conversation, but Harriet could not think of one. Her brain was rusting from disuse. She had not written a word in the last 18 months that was not part of a list or a letter.

"It must have been very stressful for him--" The dean began, but little Honoria chose that politic moment to open her mouth and announce her hunger in no uncertain terms. Harriet excused herself to feed the baby. As she was setting them both to rights, she heard her sons tearing across the quad and Peter exhorting them to slow down. Like a needle to a lodestone, she went to them. Peter was laughing at something Padgett, the porter, was saying to him. The sound was more welcome than any music.

Harriet joined them. Honoria attempted to put one plump foot into her mouth. The boys were playing their own noisy version of tennis, which looked nothing like actual tennis.

"Lady Peter! A pleasure to see you!" Padgett greeted her, but he reached out to tickle Honoria who giggled. She seemed able to charm everyone as effortlessly as her father. Harriet had been a serious and introverted child raised by a serious and introverted father. This daughter of hers seemed capable of becoming an outrageous flirt. Sons were lovely, but having a daughter was so fraught and different. She hoped for much and feared a great deal more.

Honoria grabbed a fistful of her father's sleeve with an expression rather like one of the dowager's. If Honoria were at all like her namesake, Harriet felt she would have accomplished something very fine. Though perhaps it was nothing to do with her. Children were mysterious little beasts. 

Padgett had to return to his post and Peter led her over to watch the boys make a ruckus. They wielded their rackets like cricket bats, which meant that the balls soared away when hit eliciting great gales of laughter and cheers. 

Peter held out his arms to take his daughter. Harriet hadn't expected him to be a hands-on father, but perhaps that had been a notion out of novels. The dowager had very clearly been a hands-on sort of mother. Peter hadn't been cleaned up and trotted into the drawing room once a day at teatime like a curiosity. 

"I'm not sorry we left Nurse at home, but I should like to be alone with you," Peter said. Honoria nestled into the crook of her father's arm. His eyes were brighter, his shoulders less weighed down when he held his daughter. She seemed to remind him that there was still good in the world. 

"There wasn't room in the car for Nurse," Harriet said practically. "And she needed a holiday." 

"I know, domina. But _in the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove..._ 2"

Harriet refrained from pointing out that at fifty-five years of age, Peter was hardly a young man, but if his thoughts were of love then she was glad. He hadn't quoted much poetry of late, nor had he used that old honorific in dog's years. Harriet brushed the toe of her shoe back and forth across the nap of the grass. Perhaps the whole world was coming back into a kind of spring. He stood so close that his sleeve touched hers and it seemed more intimate than they'd been in months.

When the last of her restraints had fallen away, all those years ago in this very place, she had yielded to Peter, but more importantly to herself. The earth had come up beneath her feet and she knew that she and Peter were truly equals. She'd been able to look him in the eye and offer him something more valuable than sordid gratitude. She _was_ both a heart and brain because she'd chosen to be and she wouldn't go back to being all brain, no matter the cost.

"We could come back on our own," Harriet said. 

"Yes." Peter dodged a tennis ball that would have otherwise knocked his eyeglass clean off, which was followed by a chorus of apologies. "I think we're due a holiday as well." 

"We could come back in June and go out on the river." She wanted that very much. 

" _In a beautiful pea-green boat._ Though I think I'd prefer not to head out to sea in a punt. We can return to the scene of the crime, as it were. I shall fall rudely asleep and you may rifle my pockets for matches and reading material and admire my sleeping form as Psyche did Eros." 

"Peter! You rat. I never knew if you could tell that I'd been watching you sleep." 

"My dear woman. You went the most delightful shade of crimson, rather like you are right this moment. It was the happiest moment of my life up until that time. Since then…" This time he was not looking at his daughter with singular adoration. He was looking at his wife and he actually seemed to be seeing her. Harriet swayed toward him, but she caught herself. She'd already rudely fled tea and would not compound her sins by kissing her husband on the college lawn.

"Oh." Harriet looked quickly around to make sure no one was paying them any mind. It was lovely to know that one's husband of more than ten years could put one to the blush, but not for an audience. 

"We shall return in June, my love, but now we need to round up this gang of ruffians if we're to be in London by six-thirty." 

Harriet left Peter to sort out the tennis gear and returned to the SCR for a few brief moments, with promises to visit again soon. She'd stay longer when she could bear it. The boys said very pretty good-byes to the dons. Peter was gallant to a fault and then piled everyone in the car. The first leg of the journey was taken up with all of Bredon's plans to attend Balliol. He queried his father for every detail of how it would be and what sort of car he should drive and what he would eat and what he should read.

Harriet consoled herself that she had at least another three years before he left for Eton. Peter had at long last learned to obey the speed limit, at least when he had the children in the car. For now they were all together. It filled her heart to bursting and her brain let it.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. To the Balliol Men Still in Africa by Hilaire Belloc
> 
> 2\. Locksley Hall by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 
> 
> 3\. The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear


End file.
